


my baby's on his last life, darlin'

by belatrix



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mob, F/M, Incest, Non-Graphic Violence, POV Alternating, Past Abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-08
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2019-02-12 04:20:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12951174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belatrix/pseuds/belatrix
Summary: Jon is burying his face in her neck, and she waits to feel teeth, or tears.I’m right here, she won’t say. He already knows.I’m here. Jon is painting promises and declarations of urgent, frightened love across her skin. Jon is letting his heart leak from the cracks, pour out onto her bed and he won’t mind the mess he’s making, because she won’t, either. Jon holds her and vows to protect her with all the guilt and the romance of a killer.[Jon, Sansa, and trying to hold onto each other through blood and bullets.]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> ...I'm not even sure. This was written completely on a whim and messily and there's no actual plot, but I just _really_ wanted to for some reason? It's more a collection of one-shots taking place in the same AU than an actual linear story, really. (Also Jon and Sansa do think they're siblings here, so there's that. GoT's s6 was a mess but it just gave me a lot of feelings about these precious babies, okay.)

 

 

 

The girl has hair redder than the sleek convertibles parked outside, set into the sort of nice glossy curls that screams money and patience, ‘cause you got to work them at least an hour every morning to get it right, just like the magazine covers. The girl has red hair, but she got red lips too, painted sharp and precise and it won’t leave a stain when she brings a beer bottle to her mouth.

She’s wearing low pumps that match the bow of her dress, cotton candy pink, and her skirt is white and wide and stopping just at the height of her kneecaps, whispering as she shifts on the barstool, legs politely crossed at the ankle.

A man across the room sees the way a heart-shaped pendant falls at the edge of her neckline, how soot-dark eyelashes brush the rise of her cheekbones when she blinks. He stands, grins, drink in hand.

There’s a figure in black sliding right next to her in the space of a breath, then, all slicked back hair and leather, a gloved hand coming to rest on the small of her back before the man can make his move.

“I didn’t―” the man starts, but Jon Snow is staring at him with eyes that are too dark and too hard and too old for his face, free hand already hovering at his hip, over the gleaming metal of the gun tucked at his waistband.

“You better go, sir,” Jon Snow says, low, and the girl with the red hair touches her fingers to his wrist, and if you squint your eyes just so, it’s not as easy to tell who’s protecting who. “She’s my sister.”

This is what they whisper in the streets: someone touched her once when she didn’t want to be touched, left her skin bruised for all the world to see, and Jon Snow brought the Boltons’ rings and bars and warehouses crashing down in flames, drowned ‘em all in blood till there was nothing but dead bodies rotting on the asphalt left.

But that, that’s a story for another time.

Right now, “she’s my sister,” Jon Snow says, throws the words like bullets, and Sansa’s mouth curves at the corner, her hand falling over his.

 

 

 

Jon Snow, war hero before twenty, head of the bad parts of town before twenty-five; stuff like that, it’s what legends are made of, and Jon Snow can’t go anywhere without being recognized, not anymore, not now that this place lives and breathes his (first) name like it’s a prayer, like it’s a curse, like the stories you read on the Sunday paper.

Jon Snow has always been a bastard first and a son second, a soldier first and a boy second, a brother to men who didn’t share the same blood as him but now, _now_ ―

He’s got his revolver hidden under his coat and a dagger strapped to his ankle, because how can he not?

(The thing nobody knows: Sansa keeps a pistol in her dainty purse as well, a socialite’s handgun, pretty and pearl-handled and just the right size to fit, unnoticed, up the sleeves of her furs. She’s only used it once, but she won’t tell anyone but Jon about it, and she doesn’t like to think about it much lest it become too real a weight to properly ignore when she’s got to.)

Men hold their shoulders straight and duck their heads when Jon Snow walks into the room, any room, because Jon Snow used to be nothing but now he’s everything. The city’s edges and shadows have stretched and twisted to accommodate him, streetlights flickering over the empire no one ever expected would fall into his hands.

And Jon, he went to war alright, but no one’s really sure he ever came back.

 _Guess that’s what makes him good at the business_ , someone says over a game of pool, voice drowned out in cigar smoke, _the kid ain’t never gonna stop fighting_.

Once, Jon got stabbed so close to the heart everyone thought he was dead.

Once, Jon got stabbed so close to the heart that he should be dead, but he isn’t, he’s here, and he has the scar across his chest to prove it and he’s even learned to joke about it. In that tired way of his.

Says, _it’s my good luck charm, how ‘bout that_.

Sansa traces her fingers over it, sometimes, feels raised skin and even heartbeat, thinks that this is her brother, right here, this blood beating under a cold knife wound, this is Jon.

This is Jon.

 

 

 

In another life he might’ve been the good guy, fighting to save the world, his family, his soul ―anything. Dying for a cause greater than yourself, it’s got a hell lot of a poetic ring to it. And it sounds so damn pure, so good, so honorable, so everything he always dreamt of being and so everything he’s not.

In another life, she might’ve been the princess, holding onto her love and her sweetness and her innocence, because having a heart big enough to make the world into something pretty, it sounds far too nice to be true, a thing straight out of the movies.

But this is the life they’ve got here, side by side in a black car out on the open road, Sansa’s bright wedges on the dashboard, Jon’s fedora dipped low and slanting.

Jon’s got one hand on the steering wheel, the other slung out the window, a cigarette smoking thinly as it dangles between bruised knuckles. Sansa purses her lips, “this is bad for you, you know.”

There are so many things in their lives that are bad for them, and Sansa, well, she’s content enough not thinking about any of it now.

Jon’s laughter is a cough of smoke. “Father always said it ruins your teeth, gives you wrinkles.” His grip on the wheel is steady, so steady, like he wants to prove to himself he can do this, he can keep it all running smooth. “Maybe it’s true, maybe it’ll fuck my face up, make me look older.”

And Sansa thinks ― _oh_.

 

 

 

It’s the middle of winter, the snow falling like whitewash over the town’s grey canvas, and some people whisper, some people wonder ―are Jon and Sansa…?

All sorts of fucked up things happen around here, anyway, and no one thinks they’d really be surprised, but they keep their suspicions low and muttered behind their hands, because―

― _because_ , someone called Sansa Stark a whore when she wore a black skirt slit up to _here_ , and Jon twisted the man’s arm behind his back and held a knife to his throat, face set into grim lines as he growled, “take this as a warning.”

But Jon and Sansa go dancing together that Friday night, and everyone stares while pretending not to stare. Song after song his hands are on her waist, feather-light and so very bare without those leather gloves on; always high enough that it wouldn’t ever be considered inappropriate, low enough that his fingers have to curve across the silk fabric of her dress, a little too snug around her hips.

They’re a whirlwind under the artificial golden lights, limned in gems and smoke, Sansa’s curls like a waterfall of blood enveloping them both as they spin. He smiles at her and she smiles at him and everyone agrees they’re a vision, sharp dark suit molding into silver sequins. Their wholeness, it’s in that way they’re both breathing each other’s air, in that way they’re both a little dead behind the eyes.

“I love this song,” she says, mouths the words against his neck when he leans close to spin her around. Her dress sways gently with it, and he can’t quite hide the shudder that ripples down his spine.

He pulls just a little away, their dance falling back into propriety again as the music slows, “it’s a good song.”

There’s something hoarse in his voice, something catching and faltering and she can’t help it; she sighs, feels her heart break in every place that’s still left tender, holds his gaze. “It’s about love,” she tells him like they’re sharing a secret, but really, has there ever been a melody written that was not about love?

This is how it happened, the first time he said it, whispered _love you_ with that weary roughness that makes her ache all over ―he’d also said, _got a new shipment coming tonight, liquor and rifles, down by the docks, gotta be careful, the Lannisters might try a raid, you never know_ ―

You never know, and Sansa closes her eyes and lets the singer’s voice fill her up, like fraying velvet, feels every place where Jon’s fingers are softly pressed up against her waist.

“I know that,” Jon says, and it’s barely more than an exhaled breath, “I know it’s a love song.”

 

 

 

The catch: there’s no one in all of town who hasn’t asked after his mother, who doesn’t remember Ned Stark tearing his gaze away and keeping his secrets locked tight behind his teeth, because Ned Stark wore pin-striped suits and carried two guns but he was a good man too, as good as anyone around here can remain, kept his kids away from drugs and brothels and never killed anyone who didn’t deserve to be shot dead.

The catch: there’s no one in all of town who’s stopped whispering about his aunt, ‘cause that’s not the kind of story you forget, it’s not the kind of thing you won’t discuss over a game of cards, late in the night, high or drunk.

(The Targaryens built this place from the ground up, ruled it all across, from the railway stations to the docks, from the Governor’s house to the red light streets, from south to north ―and then Lyanna Stark disappeared, and Rheagar Targaryen died out on the sidewalk from a dozen stab wounds, and the Targaryens were no more when Ned Stark went home with a baby tucked away in his trench coat, and, and―)

The catch: Jon never got the family name, he got sent away to the army as soon as he learned how to use a pistol, and the world up there was so white and so cold that after he returned everyone called him _Snow_. His brothers and his sisters were good people, everyone says so, beautiful-faced children who went to private schools and wore expensive cashmere sweaters and didn’t have to keep daggers under their belts, because Ned Stark tried to steer ‘em away from this world, Ned Stark kept his kids clean.

But Jon is Jon Snow as soon as he blows right back into town, and he’s done legwork for Mance Rayder and he’s been in three raids and run from the cops and he’s cut a man’s head off and stolen diamonds and he’s bought and sold and dipped his hands in blood up to the elbow, and they all agree, yes, this is the one, this is the man born for this life.

And Sansa, she knows better.

She knows, because that same tiredness that’s gripping Jon by the throat is curled up inside her too, rattling against her ribcage, seeping into the marrow, that kind of tiredness that never quite goes away.

He’s good at this, her brother, he _is_ ―he sits at the head of the table and surveys his turf with a level, cold stare, but his hands are always itching under his gloves, always ready to reach for a gun, and if he sometimes glances her way when he’s not sure the decision he’s made is right, well, Sansa sees it, Sansa is _there_.

“Listen to me,” she tells him, after, behind closed doors, “listen to _me_.”

And he does.

Sometimes, he does.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...aand there's more of this self-indulgent plotless mess, because I can't help myself.

 

 

 

 

The people who don’t know them ―the crews from neighboring towns, cops who haven’t been bought over yet, and all of them get fewer and fewer every day― pause, in that sharp second between the flash of Jon’s coat and Sansa’s heels puncturing the entrance, they wonder, _Snow’s old lady?_ But Sansa holds out a pale hand, tastefully adorned in white gold and diamonds.

“Sansa _Stark_ ,” she says, the sibilants drawn out, low, and at her side Jon tips his head, coolly polite. But he won’t shake any hands, just in case he’ll have to draw a gun, in case he’ll need to give a signal to his men, an entourage armed to the teeth following short behind.

Others look at them and think: _children_. Well, those people just have to be taught better.

 

 

 

And yet―

“I shouldn’t be here,” he says, running his fingers, absently, through Ghost’s fur; he curls closer against Jon’s side, lazy and content and still taking up half the bed. “In your room. People talk.”

Sansa sits at her vanity, all silk bathrobe and candy-pink negligee rising up past her knees. She sets her hair in plastic curlers, gives Jon a small hint of a smile through the mirror. “People have always talked,” she tells him, sharp ―but not unkind. Jon manages not to look as she bends to roll her stockings up her legs, fastens her garters. “You can’t worry every time they do. You’re the one _they_ should be worried about.”

Jon opens his mouth to disagree, but the words get caught under his tongue, tumble into each other. He searches his pockets for a smoke, something to hide behind.

(He killed a man the night before. He’ll have killed another before the week’s done.

Sansa isn’t wrong ―but, she rarely is. He learned this soon enough.)

 

 

 

It’s not about the city sprawling at their feet at night, swimming on smuggled whiskey, brandy, gin, it’s not about the money, it’s not about revenge; it’s not about how they won’t waste their time on smiles when they’re in public, or how they don’t need to talk, together in the same bedroom when she’s painting her nails and he’s cleaning his guns; it’s not about how good she looks in stolen jewels, how he’ll never get high on his own dope, can’t risk losing focus like that.

It’s not about a hundred different things, but it’s their lot in life, with all of the edges and corners that come with it and how they’re always, _always_ sharp, the smallest slip and you’ll get cut. Torn to pieces.

Sansa carries a last name with its history and its blood and its shadows, been dragging it behind her ever since she saw her father’s head floating in dirty dock water; but it’s only now that it seems ready to unfold, shine across every last inch of this town’s miserable underground. Now, with Jon by her side, under that dark stare and that cold, set face she’s come to know like the inside of her hand.

“I didn’t choose this,” he tells her, in the dark, in her ear, in the slope of her shoulder ―away from anyone who shouldn’t hear, shouldn’t see. “I didn’t, but they chose me, and I―”

He falters, then, something like a broken sigh torn from his throat, his single kiss still spreading across her skin, right above the collarbone.

And it’s nights like this, hot and sticky with blood and cigarette smoke and the sky’s blackness slowly giving way to a bruised blue, right beyond the window. They still haven’t slept but that’ll have to wait ―nights like this, when he stops talking halfway through but brown eyes find hers in the low light of the bedside lamp, feral with a frightening sort of desperation: _I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know if I can keep doing it_.

“If not you, then who else?” she says, and when she runs her fingers through his hair, nails just barely scraping skin ―he lets her. He leans against her, into her, lets her hold him, and no one’s ever seen him like this, like he’s torn out everything he’s got inside him, handed it over to someone else to hold.

And he’ll let out a chuckle, flat and sad and tired and old, _so old_. “If not me, then who else.”

(It’s all gone in the morning.

Every last trace of vulnerability, dissipating, and he’s pushed his face and his body into that frigid hardness again, a quiet kind of violence tucked right behind his eyes. And his gun at his waist; always at his waist.

Sansa watches him, thinks ― _yes, good, this is who you have to be_. This is who they have to be.)

 

 

 

She never asks him about the war, same way he never asks her about the years she spent at the Lannisters’ manor, her aunt’s house on the cliff, the Boltons’ basements at the edge of town.

They don’t need to; it’s in the lines of their bodies, there for the other to see clear as day, imprinted into every bone and curve, dripping from the words they speak.

But he tells her once, only once ―’cause he left brothers behind, he did, and sometimes he wakes up and the sheets around him are a trench dug into snow and mud all over again, death closing in from all points of the horizon, soaking through with rain and blood. He tells her, fumbling with his lighter and in the end she lights his cigarette for him, “some of the guys,” he says, “some of the guys shot themselves in the foot, just to be sent back to the hospital, back home, anything to get away from the crossfire, the bombs.”

She touches his arm, tender like a kiss, tender like a knife through flesh, half an inch to the right and it’d hit the heart. “Not you,” she says.

He breathes in fire, blows a halo of smoke up to the ceiling. He can’t meet her eyes, not like this, ‘cause Sansa looks like a porcelain doll, pale and sweet, ‘till you reach her eyes, and her eyes remind him of all the places he’s ever wanted to call home, all the places that damn near killed him, “not me.”

 

 

 

One night ―and it’s only _one night_ , they can afford to be young and drunk and lazy for a few hours only, she tells herself this until it doesn’t sound so much like a lie anymore―

―one night she lies down next to Jon on the roof of their old house, passing a bottle of whiskey back and forth and looking up at the stars.

She’s still not used to the taste, and just how funny would that sound were she to speak it out loud, how terribly ironic now that a quarter of the Stark income is all Jon’s contraband liquor; but after a while it slides down her throat warmer and easier, and her head feels light, bubble-dizzy. The alcohol, then, it must be doing its job right.

She can focus on the thousand tiny lights up ahead and her brain turning to cotton and pretend Jon isn’t riding out with his men first thing tomorrow, _we’re leavin’ at first light_ , all very hushed, another job, another raid, another morning that might as well find him ―all of them― dead.

(Pretend she won’t have to sit at her window and wave him goodbye as he climbs on that black motorcycle and straps a shotgun to his back.

 _Just in case_ , he’ll say, drop a barely-there kiss to her forehead, _just in case_. As if there could be a chance they’ll get away without a shoot-out, without bodies littering the asphalt, without, without.

But he’s _promised_ her, he’ll always come back. And what else can she do but trust him?)

He breathes out a sigh, one finger tracing idle patterns around the sweating bottleneck. Sansa glances over; he’s got his top buttons open and booze brimming in his eyes and Sansa stills, quiets, takes in all that slack youth laid out under the starlight, Jon’s face pale and dazed and tired, boyish innocence all over for anyone who might look, but not _see_.

She wonders what he’ll look like when he’s old and grey. _He might never get to that no one around here ever does_ , goes the back of her mind, beating along with her pulse, and there’s a sudden bubble of something tight and awful rising up her throat, and―

She’s just managed to will the thought away ( _stop thinking, the stars are beautiful_ ) when he rolls over to his side, his gaze seeking hers as a tousled lock of dark hair falls, slow and heavy, over his eyes.

“Littlefinger’s been staring at you,” he says, apropos of nothing.

A startled silence; Sansa huffs out a laugh, as Jon hands her over the bottle. “I know,” she says, and drinks. “I know.”

“Sansa―”

“We need Littlefinger,” she reminds him, a little hoarse, a little slurred. “If― if we’re looking to expand, move across the border, we’ll need―”

“Just lookin’ out for you.”

He cants his face back towards the sky. He’ll pin her with the same worried stare when his head’s clear again; that small line between his brows, the cold set of his jaw, the way his body’s always tipped forward and ready to _hurl_ , coiled and tight like a gun every single time Petyr slides next to her, leans a little too close to whisper something in her ear.

“I’ll be fine,” she says, low and soft. The night glitters and blurs all around her, and when she reaches out a hand towards Jon, he lets his eyes fall closed and links her fingers with his own, his thumb stroking small circles across the side of her palm. “Be careful, tomorrow, _please_. And―” she breathes out, and her voice’s even again, “do come back before noon. You promised we’d go to the races together.”

He laughs, a little. Only a little, always only a little. For now, for them, it might be enough.

 

 

 

The good people of this good town, they call him a monster ―but then, they’ve always called him a lot of things, and Jon learned early enough that none of it means anything, not unless you listen.

Sansa, she calls him things too, in her soft singer’s lilt, and _those_ he does bothers to hear.

Not ‘cause he believes them, mind you; she splays those pale fingers over his heart and tells him he’s a good person, a good leader, a good brother, a good― _well_ , none of it has anything to do with the real story, here, but Jon could spend all his days listening to her, looking up at her, down to her lips as they move, and what if he sometimes lets himself pretend she’s right about her faith in him?

What about it, indeed.

The good people of this good town call him a monster, and Jon doesn’t got much of a defense against it these days. Not when he’s got to sleep with a knife secured right under his pillow one night, order a hit on a rival the next; a monster he just might be, and the only path he’s got left, is owning up to it.

This is true, but it’s not necessarily the truth.

 

 

 

He takes her to the races, in the end.

(Jon came back and Jon was limping and Jon had a fresh scar carved into his face, red and raw and angry, but Jon was alive and his lips were curled into the beginnings of a fond smile ― _I promised you we’d go together, sis_ ; he mumbled the words against her hair when she flung herself into his arms, as soon as he jumped off his motorcycle, his men sprawling out behind him, armed and hard-faced and staring. She hadn’t cared. She hadn’t cried. And he’d promised.

 _I’ll return_ , he’d said, and he did.)

They sit in the balcony, Jon smoking and Sansa holding her purse in her lap and the horses’ hooves beating the dust, people screaming, people waving. She gives him a sideways glance, a small curve of the mouth, tells him, “don’t forget to pretend to be excited when our horse wins,” and he huffs out a laugh that’s all smoke.

Their horses always win, of course.

It was Petyr’s idea, the betting house, and Jon was ― _is_ ― suspicious and he might shoot himself before he shakes Littlefinger’s hand in thanks, but it brings them good money. Sansa’s learned how to manage books upon books of fake winnings, fixing the numbers in the shadows while Jon sits at the table, generously sharing his illegal cigars and his top-shelf gin with the men from all over town cheerfully placing their bets, trusting the Stark name with their money.

They buy a round to celebrate, and Jon might not be a liar but he’s been getting better at feigning surprise, putting on his winner’s face. People clap his back in congratulations, beaming, and if their expressions flicker when they see him kiss Sansa’s cheek, just off the corner of her mouth, well, they’re smart enough to turn away.

And, later:

“Sansa,” he says, his voice low with the exhaustion he’s kept hidden away all day, worn hoarse like gravel. The wound down the side of his face got patched up quick, but it’ll leave another scar for her to trace, another line to ask, _how much longer do you have?_

“Sansa,” he says, and there’s something wet on her cheek and the first thing on her mind is blood ―but it’s only tears, of course it’s just tears, but she can’t remember the last time she cried and she can’t let herself, not now, not anymore.

_How much longer do you have?_

And she can do nothing but stay here, by his side, and she takes his hand and he looks so _pale_ , as if he were a ghost, someone Sansa might walk through and come out bloodless, clean. “It’ll be easier in the morning,” she says, because it’s all she could possibly say, pulls him close and kisses his hairline, laces her fingers ‘round his neck.

“In the morning,” Jon says, a pained echo, but he seems to be sitting straighter, already, sense memory kicking the steel back into his body. _Fighting a war_ , Sansa thinks, but then Jon has his arms around her, and she doesn’t think at all. “It’ll be easier in the morning,” Jon says, “I know.”

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

 

 

 

It goes like this: Jon Snow and Sansa Stark walking together into the empty building, silhouettes sharp under the flickering lights, a flood of white and broken-up grey, too ugly, too real. Sansa’s heels click-click-clicking away across concrete, Jon’s knife tucked carefully in his boot.

Jon stops, falters, steadies himself again. He looks at her, decidedly not dressed for the occasion, in her pretty dress and pretty fur coat, a wash of paint and glitter over marble. Sansa wears her dresses like battle armor, and there’s always a crease he can’t iron out, the fold between silk and skin, bleeding all the way up to her eyes, right to the center of her irises.

And he can’t quite help himself, he never could, not with her; he smiles, and it’s a soft, small thing, and when it makes her smile up at him in return something kicks inside his chest. Right there, right where the knife went in, went out, a flood of blood, and Sansa’s smile.

“Alright,” he says, and it sounds too loud, too rough, reverberating around the empty building, sliding off the walls. “Alright. See those tin cans lined up over there? We’ll start with those."

Sansa nods, a little, and then she’s taking her delicate little pistol out of her velvet purse, pushing tubes of lipstick and feather quills out of the way. “I’m ready,” she says, and her voice is cold and steady, and she’s got pearls around her wrists, and Jon remembers having seen a string of bruises there, remembers―

“Alright,” he says again. Tries not to think, leans closer, uses his hands to guide hers.

 

 

 

“You two work well together,” someone tells them once. It’s a slow day, or at least the pretense of one, their bodies lazy and their mouths less sharp, Jon’s fingers away from the gun, no gloves, Sansa’s feet bare and milk-white instead of those liver-piercing heels.

“You two work well together,” someone tells them, and―

It’s not a lie, and the smoke-filled room shifts a little as Sansa sits up straighter, makes sure her knees won’t brush Jon’s under the table. She hides the flutter of a half-smile behind her hair, and Jon tilts his head, brings the bottle to his mouth, says, “that’s the point, isn’t it?”

There are two dozen pairs of eyes on them, Karstarks and Mormonts and Umbers and all of their father’s old crew, all of Robb’s friends who didn’t end up lined in chalk, and there are Petyr’s men hovering in the corners, too. Gazes are sliding over Sansa, narrowed, assessing, nodding, and all of them think the same thing, echoing ― _you two work well together_.

Sansa rests a gentle hand on Jon’s arm. A diamond bracelet shining over rough black fabric, and she calls him _brother_ , soft, dipping and lilting, _brother_.

Jon looks straight ahead, feels the imprints of her fingers burn through his shirt, bloom like bleeding welts across the skin.

He drinks, and says again, “that’s the point, isn’t it.”

Baelish, tipping his own glass towards Jon, a salutation. “That _is_ the point, Mr. Snow,” he says, with a smile tucked in the corner his mouth like a scalpel. Jon leans forward before he's thought it, and suddenly there’s Sansa’s hand again, just barely touching his elbow; a warning. _Don’t_. Jon glances down, and sees his own fingers gripping the edge of the table, splinters threatening to break through skin. He falls back into his seat, heavy, and Sansa’s nails dig into him for all the space of half a breath.

The point is that he’s no-one’s heir and she’s no-one’s wife, but he’s her family like she’s his family, and blood matters in this part of the city, names have their place carved out of flesh and gunpowder, etched into the asphalt, into wads of bills, into the bottom of a whiskey bottle.

Sansa’s already started to steer the conversation away, baring the pale line of her throat as she laughs, earrings glittering, teeth sharp under red lips. They’re looking at her now, laughing along with her, clinking their glasses with hers, every man and woman in the room orbiting around Sansa Stark, pulled in by her voice, her jokes, her stories, the flash of her wrist as she tucks her hair behind one ear.

Two dozen gazes, keen and watchful and expectant, grabbed away from Jon, drawn toward Sansa with terrible, effortless precision. No-one's looking at him now. _Thank you_ , he almost tells her, _god, Sansa, thank you_. He lights a cigarette instead.

 

 

 

(A memory:

It starts with Jon standing by the car, under a streetlight, boots smudging into mud and melting snow.

It’s midnight and he’s got his hands shoved down his pockets as deep as they can go, feels the sharp bite of the northern cold burrow into his bones, coil tight around his throat. It’s midnight and Jon is a hundred lifetimes away from the place he once called home, and it’ll be another hundred lifetimes more before he goes back, before the backstreets of his father’s town open their welcoming arms for him. It’s midnight and Jon’s a kid turned soldier turned made man, with nothing but a coat, a gun and a dog to his name. It’s midnight, and Jon is―

“Fucking freezing,” Edd grits out, breath a white cloud in the broken lamplight. “Fucking _Thorne_ , he was supposed to be here an hour ago.”

The business’s been bad, operation after operation going straight to hell, shoot-outs in the middle of the streets and warehouses crumbling down, bodies everywhere. And Jon in the middle of it, Jon doing his job, playing his role, ‘cause he’s a part of this now; no longer assigned to daylight legwork, no longer the bastard boy serving as a look-out, now he’s one of the guys.

The day he was made, they held a proper fucking feast for him. And Jon, he locked himself in his room and got piss-drunk, passed out on the stone floor.

The day before he’d heard Robb was dead; the day before that Sansa’d been married, passed off to a Bolton who’d taken over their family’s house, and Jon emptied an entire magazine into a wall, fired until his ears rang with the gunshots and he hadn’t room to think anymore.

“He’ll be here,” Jon says, rooting himself back in this iced moment, and his whole body’s shivering like his skin’s trying to turn in on itself, crawl off. It was cold back home, and it was cold up in Mance’s makeshift campsite of a town, but not like this. Not with this dead, creeping finality, every breath hurting, winds like knives.

“Shit,” Edd hisses, “shit, I bet the asshole’s back at the club, all warm and smoking those damn cigars of his. He’ll piss himself laughing thinking ‘bout how he left us waiting all night.”

“Go look around for him then. I’m staying here.”

“Jon.”

“I told ‘em I’d wait here, that’s what I’ll do.” He tucks his head down, chin under his scarf. “Edd, just go. I’ll be fine. I got my gun, and I got Ghost.”

It starts with Jon standing by the car, under a streetlight, boots smudging into mud and melting snow.)

 

 

 

Jon hears it from across the corridor, a gun being picked apart and back together again. The unmistakable, secret, animal sound of it: metal pushing in, then clinking against a wooden surface. It’s been hardwired into his brain since childhood, inescapable, as familiar as the scar curling above his heart.

“Sansa,” he says, whispers as though someone might hear, pushing the door to her bedroom open. Gently, gently. “What are you doing.”

Sansa at her vanity, a fixed image that’s begun to blur at the edges, and she’s assembling a pistol. Pale fingers, powder-pink nails, gold rings, Sansa pulling back the slide with a quiet competence, the soft sharp _click_ , then the magazine.

“Practising,” she says easily, not bothering to look up. Lamplight catches in her hair, reflecting off the metal. Jon breathes out.

“Oh,” he says, sitting down on the edge of her bed, the mattress dipping under his weight like mud and snow giving way under his shoes. He runs a hand through his hair, sweat-slick at the end of the day, pulls a cigarette from a crumpled, half-empty pack in his jacket pocket. “Oh.”

A barely-there sigh. “Don’t start,” Sansa says, snapping the gun shut. It’s a pretty piece, chrome silver, smooth in its sleekness, a handle carved and polished for a lady. It suits her, and Jon looks away, takes a deep drag and lets the smoke lap at his skin.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to.” She says it before she’s thought it, and he knows it in the same way she knows him; every cadence of his voice, its dips and edges, the way she always rushes to his side just when his mind is swelling like a bruise, everything hurting. Like she can see everything in his eyes. Maybe she can. “Don’t watch me, Jon, I can’t concentrate.”

“You’re doing fine,” he says, because he can’t think of anything else to say. Because he can’t think of a possible scenario, any damn array of events, that would require his sister to put together a gun, not with those soft hands, God, not if he can help it. Not if he’s there.

“Don’t watch me,” she says again, and there’s no real bite in it. It’s just tired, spent, an exhale of a breath, reaching him with the clarity of a dead body at his feet, glass eyes staring up at him.

 _Sansa_ , he almost says, _Sansa, please_. He almost does say it, and then doesn’t. He wouldn’t know what to beg of her, anyway. He should go. Leave her room. Pretend he’s never thought it, he’s never wanted―

“Jon.”

There’s a new sharpness to curve of her lips, now. Not cruel, she doesn’t know how to be cruel with him, same way he doesn’t know how to stay away. They don’t teach you these things in the army.

“ _Jon_. You’re going to burn my sheets.”

He blinks, once, twice, and it takes him the entirety of five seconds to look away from her hands around the gun and down at his own. The cigarette’s burnt to the filter, how long _has_ he been in here, ash falling everywhere, making a mess of her soft grey comforter, his pants, the carpet. “Fuck,” he growls, “ _fuck_ ―”

“It’s alright, here.” Sansa tossing him her porcelain jewellery box, empty, him grinding out the cigarette inside, and this seems like a metaphor Jon really, truly doesn’t want to think about, doesn’t have enough heart to acknowledge, not now, just ―not now.

“I can’t think when you’re watching me,” Sansa tells him, turning around on her seat, crossing one leg over another. And Jon, he very nearly laughs, ‘cause he’s the one who almost set the goddamn room on fire, trying not to watch.

“I’m just sitting here, sis.”

“It’s distracting. Go downstairs, make yourself a coffee if you’re not going to sleep at all anyway." Because she knows this, too, of course she does, that his head’s filled with nightmares even before he’s gone to bed, that he’ll spend the night staring up at the ceiling and dragging his finger along the blade he’ll pull from under the pillow, daring himself to press down just a little harder.

“You know my coffee always tastes like shit. Can’t brew a cup to save my life.”

And, well. What if he’s better at killing people than making coffee, it’s the kind of world he lives in.

Sansa stands, nightgown swaying with her hips, pale on pale, a flutter, a whisper, _shit_. Jon swallows down nothing, has to keep himself from lighting another cigarette.

“Go out with your men, then,” she says, and he hears it, _I don’t want you here_ , only ―no, it’s not what she would say, never, not her, but maybe it’s what Jon wants her to say. He’s not sure. He’s not sure about a lot of things, lately. “They’ve been acting up, all work, no play, you know how it is. Go drink. Find yourselves some girls.”

“Sansa―” he starts, stops. “Sansa.”

 _How could I_ , he doesn’t tell her, _how the fuck could I_.

“Oh, Jon,” and her voice is impatient, now, an odd combination of fond and exasperated, with something terribly sad at the base of everything. Jon, for the entirety of one fractured moment, wonders if that voice belongs to him; he’s never heard Sansa use it on anyone else.

And it’s hanging too heavy, this sudden silence, cloying and pressing over his shoulders like a cloak, and Jon has to say something, anything―

“Where do you think we’d be,” he’s said it, he’s been thinking it since he was old enough to think, across homes and countries and battlefields and mansions and race tracks, and now he’s said it, “if not here. If we weren’t doing this. Where would we be?”

Sansa turns away, shrugs, a bare shoulder rising and falling. “Dead,” she says.

 

 

 

(A memory:

Jon Snow falls down on his knees in a pool of his own blood, and his chest is full of holes, his life leaking from the cracks, out across the ice and the dirt and the asphalt, a man dying out on the sidewalk from a dozen stab wounds.

Jon Snow falls down on his knees in a pool of his own blood, drops falling from leather like rubies, and he thinks ― _I never knew my mother’s name_ , _I never, I never_.

Jon Snow falls down on his knees in a pool of his own blood, Ghost howling in the distance just beyond the warehouse corner, hand far too heavy to move when he tries to reach for his gun, and it’s over, he’s over, because this isn’t how a boy’s story ends but a soldier’s, yes, that’s how it was always supposed to get written, only not.

Jon Snow falls―

―and wakes up, bone-white walls and snow-white sheets, a sterile room, needles, tubes, blood dried and cleaned away, and this isn’t how the story was supposed to go, either.)

 

 

 

It goes like this: Sansa, leaning close, red hair and red lips and a red dress, eyes finding Jon’s, steady and calm and tired, tired. Sansa, saying, “you’re going to teach me how to shoot a gun.”

It’s on the tip of his tongue, settled right behind his teeth, like an inhale of smoke that went down wrong, _no, no, no, Sansa, no_. But he’d do anything she’d ask of him. She knows this as well as he does.

“Alright then,” he says, and she doesn’t smile, but her face is suddenly buried in his neck, her shuddered breath piercing through his skin, her silent, stuttering _thank you_. “Tomorrow,” he mutters into her hair, lifts an arm to hold her close before he’s even thought about it, “tomorrow. I’ll make sure to find some tin cans, yeah?” and he tries to smile, fails.

Sansa’s lips touch his neck, for half a second, only half a second, before she’s pulled away again. “Yes,” she says, “yes.”

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

 

 

 

There is a day he remembers like a noose around his neck, like a chest wound, gaping and not nearly enough bandages in the world to patch it up:

Sansa almost getting shot, the abrupt slash of her body in the wind as she fell and the clear sharpness of her scream, on a wintry morning three days before her birthday.

They were hurrying down a side street with their arms linked, the scar on his face painted redder and bright by the cold, her coat billowing behind her as if he’d laid a cloak on her shoulders. Two of his men striding along at a careful pace somewhere in the back, their hats pulled low. She was laughing at something he’d said and he pulled her closer, smiling, held her tighter ―it was too early, too narrow, too cold, the street lonely and empty except for the two of them and their armed shadows following dutifully behind. Like Jon himself once had, trailing at the heels of dangerous men from a distance, on the outside and looking in; when he was working for them instead of employing them.

A thick, cloying fog was slowly settling over rooftops and burrowing through the red bricks, and one of Jon’s hands reached up to tuck a strand of Sansa’s hair behind her ear, gloved fingers moving out of habit, like pulling a trigger.

“We should go dancing again,” her voice and her breath splaying with the gentle tenderness of a kiss against his profile as she bowed her head towards his, “I’ve bought a new dress, and―”

The figure appeared from the edge of a balcony, a blurred outline against the grey sky; the shot rang out, and Jon’s arm was aflame, the bullet grazing through wool and leather. Sansa cried out, the hem of her dress caught on the edge of a paving stone and tore apart, her wordless cry getting lost between the answering fire and his own breath coming out in loud, stuttered gasps.

Sansa on the ground, a streak of crimson on her cheek, hair everywhere, dust particles catching on the soot-dark curve of her eyelashes in the silver morning light. Her would-be killer, falling from his perch above to the iced road.

Jon took her face between his hands, wet, bloodied leather against too-soft skin, and kissed her like a dying man, like a boy, like he’d never dreamed of kissing anyone before. His men saw, but never dared say a thing.

The bullet, he found out later, had been meant for her; retribution for a hit he’d ordered, the aspiring assassin confessed, struggling to speak through broken teeth and a mouth full of blood. Jon cut his tongue out, let the man bleed out in a dark, damp room in one of his lesser-known basements. It was days before he finally died.

He told Sansa he’d merely shot him, and she didn’t believe him; he spent the night curled up in his bloodied clothes, in her silk sheets, in her bed.

He remembers her pretending not to notice the beating of his heart under her palm, how it’d gone irregular, crazy, a frantic, desperate thing, how he smoked three packs before she threw his cartons away. His muttered litanies into the harsh curve of her collarbone, muffled words that evaporated against heated flesh, _I thought I lost you, I thought you were dead, Sansa, I thought, Sansa, Sansa, Sansa, Sansa_ ―

Her hand threading through his hair, only barely shaking; and his own fingers closed around her wrist, as if he would go mad unless he felt her solid and real in his grip, as if he couldn’t convince himself she was there. He held her so tight the skin bruised, a string of black and purple like a bracelet, and she kissed him, told him she didn’t mind, it was alright, it’s alright.

 

 

 

A moment: Sansa’s fingers, tracing soft patterns across the table during a late-night meeting, a delicate nail dragging along the rim of her glass, and Jon tearing his gaze away, trying to focus on the nonsensical humming of a dozen coarse tongues around him, trying not to imagine those hands spread gently, carefully, on his chest.

A moment: Jon tilting back his head to look at the sky, and it’s an endless cloudy blackness, no stars tonight. He asks her if she will visit him in prison, when he gets caught ―and there’s that word, not if, but _when_ , and Sansa’s eyes snap to him with something like alarm, something like anger. “Don’t be an idiot,” she says, strangely choked, and he can’t help a half-smile, self-deprecating and fond. He brings her hand to his mouth, kisses her knuckles like a god-fearing man would a rosary. They stay silent after that.

A moment: she’s talking to Petyr in one of the low-lit backrooms of the betting house, red hair a blur in the cigar smoke, and there’s a hand that isn’t Jon’s rising to touch her cheek, intimate as a lover’s. And Jon very nearly hurls, faster than his bullets, angrier than his knives, and Sansa doesn’t start, Sansa doesn’t pull away. A curl that might’ve been a smile forms across her mouth, satisfied, vaporous, as she lets him very nearly drag her away. She knows he will apologise for clutching like a vice at her forearm, later.

A moment: _I love you_. One of them says this. _You’re all I have left_. The quiet, exhausted exhale of a reply _. I can’t lose you_. A rushed thing, a sentimental thing, a true thing, truer than anything either of them has got left. _You won’t_. This is a promise. This is a confession. Both of them say this, _you won’t lose me_.

 

 

 

The point is―

the whole fucking point is, he never meant for this to happen.

 _This._ A word that includes, not necessarily in order but of nearly equal significance: his bar, his men, the hospital room, the drugs, the cops, his father’s old crew, his brother’s legacy, the fires, the races, the rifles, his sister.

Her, most of all. Her, above everything.

He was not supposed to come back. He was not supposed to inherit an empire. He was not supposed to want her.

The story of his life, then, must be this. He was not supposed to have done ―wanted― a lot of things.

(It’s the same thing the papers published a little over twenty years ago, about a different man and a different empire. And the different girl the different man should have never wanted, the one a gang war broke out for, the end of a dynasty, the streets alight with fire and blood.

But old stories get distorted and the meaning rots away, and no one _really_ believes that there’s no escaping blood, that history repeats itself, lives in cycles, stories and lovers and helpless wars dragged through the years.)

 _This_. A word that includes the weight of a pistol in his hand, the familiar comfort of it. The warmth of a stranger’s blood, spattering over his face as a body falls at his feet. The staccato sound of Sansa’s heels across the asphalt; the marble line of her throat.  The feel of her painted lips brushing against his, cocktail-sweet, like a flashbulb going off.

When he was young ― _younger_ ― Jon learned that you can make up for sin with a necklace and a litany of prayers learned by heart, that you could absolve yourself by sitting in a dark box, organizing your transgressions into little neat rows inside your head. All would be fine if you apologized for them to a kindly old man at church, just before lunch on a Sunday. Salvation seemed an easy thing, back then.

(It wasn’t innocence, what he had. Ignorance, maybe, and yes, he could call it that, but never innocence. That word just makes you feel like too much has been ripped from you. So he and Sansa have silently decided to avoid it.)

His list of sins has stretched long and wide, its letters dripping redder than blood ―redder than Sansa’s hair and redder than the coy shape of her mouth around one of his cigarettes, stolen with a laugh from his fingers.

He stopped believing in absolution a thousand miles back, as soon as he walked away from his father’s home, a boy with his head bowed against the winter wind, except―

Except Jon didn’t step into the business.

He crashed into it instead, a child who thought guns were beautiful and made men had honor. A bastard with something to prove, a wobbly outline of a kid to be kept out of family photos and portraits ―but who could shoot you between the eyes at thirty paces, who sometimes fell into moods so black and sullen people thought he’d got sick. A kid who bled for the first time, and instead of crying, realized he didn’t mind the feel of it.

And so the business kept him, like the army had before.

It held on to him, with empty-shell vows and the coldness of metal and a twisted sense of duty, a different sort of home.

Not a lot of people know that sometimes, between nights, he wishes that it hadn’t, but still he doesn’t bother to hide the claw marks the life’s left on him. Not from his men, not from the cops either. He was never good at hiding, anyway. Not as a boy, not as a soldier, not with―

―the first girl he loved and lost. And not with the one he loves now, never with her, never. He would twist another blade inside his heart before he tried to hide from her.

Jon walks like a ghost brought back to life through his town at night, and he wears all his history and his crimes on his sleeve. They’re sharp across the line of his mouth, they’re there in his eyes. He’s made up and stitched together in black fabrics, his very clothes crying _guilty, killer, he’s standing right there, get him_. But Jon breathes. And the newfound echo of his name breathes along with him.

He never meant any of it to happen, but it’s not all bad, having a reputation for being _dangerous_.

His father was long dead when Jon came back, a body without a head thrown carelessly away under the docks, disappeared under the ebb and flow of black water, not a second thought about it. In a single corner buried somewhere deep inside him, Jon was nearly relieved; he knows how Ned Stark would’ve looked at him now.

 

 

 

( _I thought I lost you_.

Sansa shakes the words off her shoulders. They leave her cold, restless, wanting. Her brother is a mess in her arms, his blood spreading like pressed flowers on her sheets and drying there, his pulse a drumming, animal thing beneath the pads of her fingers.

The bullet was aimed at her, and it’s not as frightening a thought as it should be. She’ll have enough time to think of it later. Now, Jon is burying his face in her neck, and she waits to feel teeth, or tears. _I’m right here_ , she won’t say. He already knows. _I’m here_.

Jon is painting promises and declarations of urgent, frightened love across her skin. Jon is letting his heart leak from the cracks, pour out onto her bed and he won’t mind the mess he’s making, because she won’t, either. Jon holds her and vows to protect her with all the guilt and the romance of a killer.

Or, with all the earnest desperation of a man who’s almost died more times than he has lived.

She takes the last of his cigarettes and places it in the curve of her mouth, a careful movement. Her lipstick is smudged and dried and it leaves a fractured stain on the filter, and when he untangles himself from her embrace to light it for her ―she sees that there are the faint beginnings of a string of bruises, already blooming around her wrist where he gripped her hand, pulling it close to his own body.

His eyes are black, bloodshot. His eyes are wet.)

 

 

 

If someone asked him how it started, looked right into those eyes and demanded the truth, they’d get no answer but a silence heavy and dripping with the threat of violence, a bullet lodged precisely in the chest for their efforts.

The answer is, simply put, that he doesn’t know. There is a chance he might not want to know.

But if you were to look at him in the right light, maybe startle the truth out of him―

―he’d tell you it’s the day he realized he loved the look of her powder-pink nails against the white of his scars, or the night a droplet of gin caught at the edge of her lips and he brushed it away, then brought his fingers to his mouth.

It was any string of glittering, lingering moments; the sway of her dress and the rise of her cheekbones and her dainty ankles. The diamonds shining at her throat like a winking secret, and the way she once touched her cheek, softly, tenderly, after he had kissed it with all the propriety of a brother.

It was the first time he saw her again and it was her arms around his shoulders, crushing him tighter, her body folding under his, frozen and shaking. It was the hoarseness of her voice and the clear, singular moment when he swore to drown the city in red for her, to kill anyone who might’ve thought to touch her.

It was― everything.

Sansa reappearing in his life like she was never not there, with a sharper cut to her eyes and steel in her spine, her limbs long and pale and tangling with his in her bed when she couldn’t sleep, it was everything, all those nights and all the interludes in between. She had seen their father die and she’d been dragged across the country by cruel-eyed men and she knew the way a gunshot rattles in your bones, even with the silencer on. It was this ―she put make-up on like war paint and curled her hair and her eyes were tired, wide and blue and old and _tired_ , and he saw himself in that, his whole life reflecting off her face like a mirror with the edges glued together at odd angles.

It was the first time she linked her fingers through his in front of a crowd, leaned close and closer, her hair a scented curtain brushing the side of his face, and she smiled.

 

 


End file.
